Cairo Circles

August 16, 2021
Mahmoud’s uneven debut explores the discrepancies of class and wealth in modern Cairo and the Egyptian diaspora through multiple strands of plot that jump back and forth in time and merge only tangentially. In mid-2000s New York City, wealthy Sheero, an undergraduate at NYU, is gleefully breaking every Muslim law in the book, doing lines of cocaine daily and living with his girlfriend, Carmen, a non-Muslim. Then his cousin Amir sets off a suicide bombing in the city’s subway, killing several other people and leading the FBI to question Sheero. Mahmoud then shifts to Cairo several years earlier for a story involving Sheero’s friend Taymour, whose housemaid’s 11-year-old daughter, Zeina, vanishes, possibly kidnapped. As Zeina’s younger twin brothers, Omar and Mustafa, grow up, their lives diverge, with Omar becoming a drug dealer and later a chauffeur for Taymour, and nerdy, depressed Mustafa studying mechanical engineering. Mahmoud explores the complexities of life in contemporary Cairo through the aftermath of the 2011 revolution. Individually, his characters are well developed, and his grasp of recent history is firm and illuminating. But almost every dramatic situation fizzles out, as the action becomes decreasingly credible and the narrative connections increasingly strained. It’s an ambitious effort with many striking details of life, but it’s undermined by its convoluted structure.

September 15, 2021
In this enthralling debut, Mahmoud dives into the lives of six characters in Cairo and the ways those lives intersect. Zeina, the young daughter of housekeeper Salma, has a voice of gold. Right on the cusp of being discovered for her angelic singing, she vanishes without a trace. Shortly after, her father is arrested for public violence, leaving her two brothers and Salma struggling to earn money however they can despite the disgrace their family has faced. Sherif and his cousin Amir grow up nearly inseparable until Sherif attends a prestigious high school and begins living a lavish lifestyle with his best friend, Taymour. Years later, Sherif's comfortable life in New York is abruptly disturbed when the police bring him in for questioning due to a subway attack conducted by Amir, unveiling the consequences of their starkly different upbringings in Egypt. Mahmoud explores the intricacies of Cairo's social dynamics and how powerful family relations, societal judgment, and class can be despite physical and socioeconomic distance. His dynamic storytelling will keep readers engaged throughout.

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October 15, 2021
Mahmoud's debut novel explores family bonds and class tension in Egypt and the United States. Spanning several decades in the lives of its characters, this novel puts a group of young Egyptians and Egyptian Americans through a host of familial, moral, and psychological challenges. Mahmoud takes his time in establishing the full scope of the story, but it gradually becomes clear that it's exploring the wake of two traumatic experiences. The book opens in 2002 with Zeina, a girl from a working-class background who has a fantastic singing voice. She dreams of growing up to be a professional singer, which puts her at odds with her family. Some time later, she vanishes. Meanwhile, Sheero, who lives in New York and narrates several of the chapters, discovers that his estranged cousin, Amir, has carried out a mass shooting in New York City. As Sheero looks back over his fraught relationship with Amir and loses himself in whiskey and cocaine, Zeina's brothers, Omar and Mustafa, struggle to find places for themselves in Egypt, a country going through substantial political changes. Sheero's best friend, Taymour--whose family employed Zeina's mother as a maid--brings the two plotlines together. There's a lot to admire here, from the way Mahmoud moves the action forward and backward in time and parcels out information about the different characters. But the novel can be frustrating in places--watching Sheero wrestle with both his memories and an onslaught of media attention in the aftermath of Amir's violent act makes for compelling reading, but a large chunk of his inner conflict is resolved in passing late in the novel. It doesn't always click seamlessly, but when this book hits its stride, it does so with great power. This novel's complex web of relationships makes for an ambitious literary debut.

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